This is the follow up post to my first post on home automation where I had just gotten a delivery with a few home automation devices. I ordered these just to play around with and see what you can do. I figured I'll share a few of the insights I've gained so far.

The internet of things (IoT) is with out a doubt the buzzword of the year. I'm not sure what the definition of IoT but to me it's about making devices (such as dishwashers, smoke alarms, doorlocks) connected. Connected appliances open up for all sorts of fun stuff such as inspecting states (how long until the dishwasher is done), notification (hey, the dishwasher is done) and remote control (start the dishwasher now).

I've started to take a more serious interest in startups and the entrepreneurial world lately. As such it's hard not to stumple upon Y Combinator and Paul Grahams's essays. One thing that resonated with me from the essay How To Start a Startup was the part on niche markets. He argues that a startup has bigger odds of making it in niche markets:

In a mobile browser there is a 300ms delay when clicking something before the actual event fires. The rational behind this is that the browser have to wait and see of you did a double tap. 300ms is a noticable delay and it make your app feel sluggish if you don't do anything about it. A common way to deal with this is to create a custom 'tap' event which is fired as soon as the finger is lifted from the screen (we use hammer.js tap these days).

As I already mentioned previously I've been working on a hybrid webapp (one part native mobile, on part HTML/JS/CSS). We are lucky to only be targeting iOS 6+, Android 4+ and Windows Phone 8+. While mobile browsers on these platforms are quite capabable they sure come with a few quirks that we have had to workaround.